Toward ease of discovery, selection and use of clusters within a cloud

While the emergence of clouds had lead to a significant paradigm shift in business and research, cloud computing is still in its infancy. Specifically, there is no effective publication and discovery service nor are cloud services easy to use. This paper presents a new technology for offering ease of discovery, selection and use of clusters hosted within clouds. By improving these services, cloud clusters become easily accessible to all clients, software services to noncomputing human user.

Museum and performing arts marketing: the age of discovery

Trends in museum and performing arts marketing from 1975 to 1994 were analyzed and suggested that a third period was emerging; the data in this article confirm that claim. Among the latest arts marketing articles, there is a significantly greater focus on marketing strategy than on the other two categories--marketing as culture and marketing as tactics.

Revelationary art of Joyce Lorraine Sullivan : an artist's experience of her inner dimensions, an inner journey of discovery

[No Abstract]

Ins and outs of discovery layers: EDS and Encore

Deakin University Library offers a number of search and discovery tools to its user communities: a web scale discovery product, a faceted display catalogue and a traditional catalogue. The presentation provides an overview of the challenges the Library has faced in its attempt to offer a seamless, comprehensive search and discovery service, that facilitates the finding of information resources. The information literacy and research skill levels of the University’s various cohort groups are considered, as well as the important role metadata plays in leading users to the resources they want.

Family support and ease of access link socio-economic status and sports club membership in adolescent girls : a mediation study

Background Much research has been conducted into the determinants of physical activity (PA) participation among adolescent girls. However, the more specific question of what are the determinants of particular forms of PA participation, such as the link between participation through a sports club, has not been investigated. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between participation in a sports club and socio-economic status (SES), access to facilities, and family and peer support, for female adolescents.

Methods A survey of 732 female adolescent school students (521 metropolitan, 211 non-metropolitan; 489 Year 7, 243 Year 11) was conducted. The survey included demographic information (living arrangements, ethnicity indicators, and indicators of SES such as parental education and employment status and locality); access to facilities; and family and peer support (travel, encouragement, watching, praise, joint participation). For each characteristic, sports club participants and non-participants were compared using chi-square tests. Multiple mediation analyses were used to investigate the role of access, family and peer support in the link between SES and sport participation.

Results There were significant associations (p<0.05) between sports club participation and: all demographic characteristics; all measures of family and peer support; and access to sport-related facilities. Highest levels of participation were associated with monolingual Australian-born families, with two parents, at least one of whom was well-educated, with both parents employed, and high levels of parental assistance, engagement and support. Participation in club sport among both younger and older adolescent girls was significantly positively associated with the SES of both their neighbourhoods and their households, particularly in metropolitan areas. These associations were most strongly mediated by family support and by access to facilities.

Conclusions To facilitate and promote greater participation in club sport among adolescent girls from low SES neighbourhoods and households, strategies should target modifiable determinants such as facility access and parental support. This will involve improving access to sports facilities and promoting, encouraging and assisting parents to provide support for their daughters’ participation in sport clubs.

The 'dis-ease' of dying: challenges in nursing care of the dying in the acute hospital setting. A qualitative observational study

BACKGROUND: Changes in health care and an ageing population have meant that more people are dying in the acute hospital setting. While palliative care principles have resulted in quality care for the dying, many patients die in an acute care, still receiving aggressive/resuscitative care. AIMS: The aims were to explore nurses' 'recognition of' and 'responsiveness to' dying patients and to understand the nurses' influence on end-of-life care. DESIGN: A qualitative approach was taken utilising non-participant observation to elicit rich data, followed by focus groups and individual semi-structured interviews for clarification. SETTING/PARTICIPANTS: This study was conducted in two acute medical wards in one health service, identified as having the highest rates of death, once palliative care and critical care areas were excluded. Twenty-five nurses consented to participate, and 20 episodes of observation were conducted. RESULTS: Nurses took a passive role in recognising dying, providing active care until a medical officer's declaration of dying. Ward design, nurse allocation and nurses' attitude to death impacts patient care. End-of-life care in a single room can have negative consequences for the dying. Nurses demonstrated varying degrees of discomfort, indicating that they were underprepared for this role. CONCLUSION: When patients are terminally ill, acknowledgement of dying is essential in providing appropriate care. It should not be assumed that all nurses are adequately prepared to provide dying care. Further work is necessary to investigate how the attitudes of nurses towards caring for dying patients in the acute hospital setting may impact care of the dying patient.

Revolt and discovery : towards an understanding of practice as research through Kristevan aesthetics

This paper will examine Kristeva’s conceptions of revolution and revolt to demonstrate the significance of her work for practitioners and researchers working in the emerging field of creative arts practice as research, a field of research that is burgeoning in the UK, Australia, Canada and Scandinavia. I will argue that Kristeva’ thought elaborates the aesthetic underpinnings of discovery and provides a rationale for the methodologies used in artistic research.

In her later work on interpretation, Kristeva places a greater emphasis on the need for analysis or theory, since the art and culture of revolt produce unfamiliar or mutant meanings that are difficult for audiences to grasp in terms of their potency for engendering social change and individual empowerment. However, she places the responsibility for this analysis and interpretation on the art critic. But what if (as is the case with the advent of artistic practice as research), the maker and the “critic” become one and the same? Can this shift in the status of artistic practice within the knowledge economy, be understood in terms of Kristeva account of the sense and nonsense of revolt? I will address these questions by revisiting aspects of Kristeva thinking on experience-in practice and examining her more recent and extended elaboration of revolutionary practice. The paper will explore how her thinking can provide practitioners with a framework for understanding creative arts research as the production of new knowledge. If as Kristeva argues, that art and literature are amongst the few means of revolt and renewal, it seems appropriate to turn to her thinking in order to articulate a rationale and argument for claiming that practice as research can operate as a driver of change and innovation in contemporary culture.

The first part of this task will involve tracing what Kristeva sees as three forms of revolt made possible through aesthetic experience. This will involve a closer examination of the notions of transgression and art as experience. Following on from this discussion, I will discuss how Kristeva’s work constitutes both an implicit and explicit critique of science allowing us to conceive of artistic research as an alternative and performative production of knowledge. Finally in this paper, I will apply and illustrate these ideas through an analysis of a selection of a number of research projects successfully completed by artistic researchers in Australia. I hope to show that artistic practice as a mode of enquiry, reveals the inextricable and necessary relationship between practice and theory, interpretation and making, art and life. I suggest that it is this interrelationship, that underpins what Kristeva describes as creative and revolutionary practice. In the context of creative arts practice as research, Kriteva’s account of experience–in-practice indicates that interpretation and analysis must fall to the practitioner-researcher himself or herself - rather than to another person who has been external to the procedures of making - to trace the significant experiential, subjective and emergent processes involved in the production of the work that allows it to reveal the new. This is necessary if the generative and revolutionary impact of artistic research is to be fully understood in the wider research arena.

RNASeqBrowser: a genome browser for simultaneous visualization of raw strand specific RNAseq reads and UCSC genome browser custom tracks

BACKGROUND: Strand specific RNAseq data is now more common in RNAseq projects. Visualizing RNAseq data has become an important matter in Analysis of sequencing data. The most widely used visualization tool is the UCSC genome browser that introduced the custom track concept that enabled researchers to simultaneously visualize gene expression at a particular locus from multiple experiments. Our objective of the software tool is to provide friendly interface for visualization of RNAseq datasets.

RESULTS: This paper introduces a visualization tool (RNASeqBrowser) that incorporates and extends the functionality of the UCSC genome browser. For example, RNASeqBrowser simultaneously displays read coverage, SNPs, InDels and raw read tracks with other BED and wiggle tracks -- all being dynamically built from the BAM file. Paired reads are also connected in the browser to enable easier identification of novel exon/intron borders and chimaeric transcripts. Strand specific RNAseq data is also supported by RNASeqBrowser that displays reads above (positive strand transcript) or below (negative strand transcripts) a central line. Finally, RNASeqBrowser was designed for ease of use for users with few bioinformatic skills, and incorporates the features of many genome browsers into one platform.

CONCLUSIONS: The features of RNASeqBrowser: (1) RNASeqBrowser integrates UCSC genome browser and NGS visualization tools such as IGV. It extends the functionality of the UCSC genome browser by adding several new types of tracks to show NGS data such as individual raw reads, SNPs and InDels. (2) RNASeqBrowser can dynamically generate RNA secondary structure. It is useful for identifying non-coding RNA such as miRNA. (3) Overlaying NGS wiggle data is helpful in displaying differential expression and is simple to implement in RNASeqBrowser. (4) NGS data accumulates a lot of raw reads. Thus, RNASeqBrowser collapses exact duplicate reads to reduce visualization space. Normal PC's can show many windows of NGS individual raw reads without much delay. (5) Multiple popup windows of individual raw reads provide users with more viewing space. This avoids existing approaches (such as IGV) which squeeze all raw reads into one window. This will be helpful for visualizing multiple datasets simultaneously. RNASeqBrowser and its manual are freely available at http://www.australianprostatecentre.org/research/software/rnaseqbrowser or http://sourceforge.net/projects/rnaseqbrowser/.